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which an edited text is built from the ground up with each stage considered as a version, a distinguishable self-contained text that does not need to be justified in terms of the author and the author’s intentions. The variants between one version and the next are seen not as errors to be corrected but as revisions in a changing text. On the whole, the variants in a many-layered manuscript—such as the extreme example of the continuous manuscript of Ulysses—that will go together to form each identifiable version will be self-evident from the process of the writing’s development. But enough instances of alternatives usually remain where the editor must exercise critical judgment. The grounds for this judgment can be procedural ones, such as the priority given to Joyce’s own inscription or the rule of the invariant context that determined whether a reading was marked as valid or deleted in the continuous manuscript text, or they can be decisions that the editor had to make on the basis of his understanding of the kinds of revision Joyce was likely to make at the pertinent stage of his work on Ulysses.

Only after the continuous manuscript text was assembled did copytext editing come into play, as the continuous manuscript text was then emended, like any other copytext, as a result of the editor’s comparison of it to the other prepublication documents and to the few postpublication documents in which Joyce was involved (primarily errata lists that he helped to prepare and corrections for the 1937 reprint of the 1936 Bodley Head edition). Since most of the collation was done to construct the patterns of writing and revision in the continuous manuscript text in the first place, the copytext editing was largely confined to eliminating errors of transmission and to emending accidentals. Again, it was not done primarily to fulfill final authorial intentions.3 The copytext editing of the continuous manuscript text is indicated in the footnotes to the synoptic text—the presentation of the editor’s assembly of the continuous manuscript text—in Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition.

The critical edition of Ulysses set as its arbitrary goal the creation of a parallel text to the historical first edition, one that ideally represents the first edition without errors. (Of course, nothing is ideal, and the 1984 edition inadvertently introduced a few errors of its own.) Such a goal was a pragmatic, and not a logically necessary, one; the assembled continuous manuscript text could have stood as the edition’s text. As it is, Gabler’s edition offers as the parallel text to the first edition text the assembled and then copytext-edited continuous manuscript text, as displayed on the left-hand pages of Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition with its system of diacritical codes showing the editor’s assembly, and footnotes revealing his emendation, of the continuous manuscript text. A further extrapolation (again the result of a pragmatic decision on the editor’s pan), offered on the right-hand pages and in this printing, is the edition’s reading text, which comprises the synoptic text without any of its words or punctuation in full or angle brackets (those deleted or changed by Joyce), its diacritical codes, or its footnotes. Episode and line numbers in this printing correspond to those on the right-hand pages of Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition.

A passage from the ‘Lestrygonians’ episode (8:654-67; pp. 138-39 in this printing) provides a good, and much-discussed, example of how the continuous manuscript text was assembled (the synoptic text is in volume 1, p. 356, ll. 10-24 of Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition).

The final working draft for ‘Lestrygonians’ is lost, so the earliest extant document is the fair copy on the Rosenbach Manuscript. The original text of this passage reads there, ‘Squatted on high stools by the bar, hats shoved back, at the tables calling for more bread no charge, swilling, chewing gobfuls of sloppy food, their eyes bulging, wiping wetted moustaches. A man with a napkin tucked round him spooned